Alaska Robotics

If anyone likes the bear illustration I did for the opening, it’s available as a Limited Edition Giclée Print signed by me, Lou, and Aaron. This is a big deal, items signed by Aaron Suring are impossible to find on eBay these days.

What other words can I add while I’m in huckster mode? Commemorative! It’s a Limited Edition Commemorative Special Triple Signature Giclée Print.. and like those plates, these prints are virtually guaranteed to go up with value. There are only thirty-two copies in existence. Thirty-two.

Thirty-two is a number with no particular significance to me and, quite frankly, a print run of thirty-two sets off all my twitchy OCD alarms but that’s how many we made. I should probably gin-up some justification for making thirty-two prints to calm my inner numerical anxiety. Ahh.. yes, thirty-two is the ASCII code for “space” and this is the print commemorating the opening of our new space.. therefore, thirty-two. Excellent. I feel better. Now go buy a print!

Speaking of prints, a big thanks to Lemon Creek Digital for turning the order around so quickly and for rolling out all of our fancy-pants giclée prints right here in Juneau. David Riccio is the man.

Phew! We made it. The doors are open!

Thanks to everyone who came to the gallery opening on Friday night, what a kick! It was great to see so many friendly faces and to have such an excellent excuse to eat fancy cheese and bacon wrapped almonds. We had to duck out a little early because of the robots but that’s life. You make plans, robots destroy them.

Putting the new space together was a long process of slow improvement, a bit like trying to lasso a high speed train, we finally got it done and now I guess we’ll see where it takes us. No doubt, it will be an adventure, and that’s what it’s all about. Adventure.

Now I need to thank about one million people. I should start with Aaron and Lou.. but I won’t.

The delicious cookies & snacks were provided by B’s Bakery and Bistro, The Rookery, Laurel & Big Mike, Alicia Jones, Loretta Mosley, and, most importantly, our dear Mothers.

Thanks to Bob & Chris at Alaska Electric for getting our lights installed on schedule and thanks to Tony Talbot who did so much work on the walls and carpentry. Thanks also to our benevolent landlords at Gross-Alaska Incorporated for opening their doors to us.

Thanks to Bridget Kuhar, Stephanie De Roo, Will Race, Jon Warrenchuck, Jamie Karnik, Katie White, Andy Kline and to Poppa Suring for all the painting and hefting.

Thanks to Sarah Asper-Smith for color and grace.

Finally, thanks to Aaron Suring and Lou Logan. You guys are the best dudes ever. Thanks for doing this crazy thing with me.

.. Whew… I think that concludes our lengthy and possibly incomplete thanks.. oh god… I almost forgot.. THE BIGGEST THANKS EVER TO CHRISTINE for reclaiming the bathroom from the monstrous toilet Cthulhu. Songs will be sung about your deeds.

The big gallery opening wasn’t the only event we had going last Friday. We also participated in the Lego Robotics Corporate Challenge, a fundraiser for the youth robotics teams in town.

This year we were cramped for time so at the last minute we gave up on all of our careful plans and built a chaotic smash-bot to destroy, rather than solve, the puzzles on the board. It was glorious. The theme was food safety and our little Monsantron got good and dirty out there crushing cattle and smashing rats with the Chop-tor 0′ Doom.

A big shout out to our team members in the Lego Robotics Division – Ty & Brevin Keltner, Ben Sapp, Jamie & Jen Karnik, and Tara Greenwood.

Thanks also to Susan Keltner for putting up with the strange noises coming from her basement at 3am.

Tara gave the newspaper what must have been a solid, full-page quote, the best unending line of pure unadulterated bullshit I’ve ever heard.

“It’s a non-deterministic universe and we are sort of moving out of the classical ideas of, you know, you have these inputs and you have a known output and in these chaotic times we wanted to tap into the interconnectedness of all things and to see what happens if we go back to the elementary and primeval … our algorithms are in some ways primitive or even shamanistic … it’s not just about destruction.”

- Tara Greenwood

You can read the rest of the article at the Juneau Empire.

I’m excited to announce that the Alaska Robotics Gallery will be opening this Friday, May 4th.

The Alaska Robotics Gallery is located in the heart of downtown Juneau at 220 Front Street and it’s a beautiful space where we’re selling our prints, cards, shirts, and a huge selection of graphic novels.

I hope you’ll join us this Friday for some fancy cheese and help us warm the house.

Here are couple of one minute films I made in September of 2009 as part of The City One Minutes project. I really enjoyed these documentary sketches of Juneau, I had room in the process for experimentation, mistakes and discoveries.

Thanks to Maaike van der Linden for visiting Juneau and getting us involved in the project. Thanks to Rory Stitt for the snippet of beautiful music. Thanks to Bridget for making me the best coat ever.

Adventures were had, coconuts were drunk, I was drunk, it all went smashingly well. Here are my photos and sketches from the Jonathan Coulton Cruise.

If you’re thinking about going next year, do.

I’m going on a nerd rock variety cruise with Marian. We’re going to have fun, I’ll take some pictures.

The most awkward, mushy holiday of them all is right around the corner. Valentine’s Day. Bah Humbug.

I do love the pageantry of it though… Decorated shoe boxes taped to the door of a classroom and butterflies doing aerobatics in every kid’s stomach. Students starting the day by boiling down huge hopes and dreams and the deepest, most secret passions into a thick stock and pouring everything into a few words on the back of a flimsy Scooby-doo greeting card.

The holiday gives kids and adults a chance to play at love by carefully selecting just the right micro-sentiment printed in a card or engraved on a chalky candy heart.

It’s fun, nerve wracking, and dangerous. A day to pay allegiance, embrace passion, and neglect your own healthy doubts.

A day to learn that when those butterflies in your stomach escape they often look more like rivers of industrial chocolate mixed with caramel and scrambled eggs.

Ok, I’m getting carried away. Valentine’s Day isn’t that bad. It’s nice that we have a holiday built around the concept of love.. but do we really need so much pink?

So this is exciting… Take a few steps past the security exit in the departure lounge at the Juneau International Airport and there’s a hidden alcove with a giant whale plane hanging on the wall.

I’m really pleased with the results and had a great time creating and installing the piece.

Here’s a better picture of the alcove with an early version of the whale Photoshopped onto the wall.

We couldn’t print on a single aluminum panel at that size so Jeannie (she’s really great) came up with the idea to do overlapping panels.

The design went through a lot of variations.

We struck on a design we all liked and I started inking and coloring the eleven foot image.

I tried for detailed simplicity, something that could be appreciated from a distance but wasn’t going to turn into fat pixels or hard vector lines up close.

We purchased the panels without any backing and had to figure out how to mount it on the wall. It was printed on aluminum by Bay Photo, they did a great job and at a reasonable price.

The aluminum prints don’t take adhesive very well but they’re light weight and look great. We tested out JB Weld and it adhered fairly well with some coarse sanding but in the end we decided to go with straight silicon.

Once we got the mounting boards into the wall studs we thought we should just leave the wall like this, it looks more like art than my art.

The panels overlap a bit so we had to mount them at different depths.

Who let this guy near the power tools?

This is me and Greg after we got the panels all squared up. Greg is the retired maintenance man who they keep around because he knows everything about the building. He was great to work with, easy going and very capable. I think he could have done this installation all himself but he was polite enough to let me feel like I was helping.

This is Jeannie, she came up with the paneling idea and kept pushing me to make the illustration better. We were both thrilled to see it up on the wall.

Well, that’s that. Go check it out next time you fly though Juneau and I’ll have some prints available in a month or so if anyone is interested.

• Comic – Fortification

I’m not sure why I thought building a physical version of a metaphoric healing process was funny. It actually seems like the kind of thing a god would do to protect his heart.